Issue 10: Black Midi's Bizarre Non-Album Singles / Jaffeelabs Housekeeping Going Forward
They really have no misses, huh? / Slight change in format + 10 issues!
Black Midi (sometimes styled in all lowercase) is a British band that's been somewhere near the top of my personal canon since I discovered them in 2022. Their sense of playfulness in both songwriting and instrumentation, the members' completely clashing styles/personalities, and the technical perfection that services each song all combine into something extraordinary, like Frank Zappa, 100 gecs, and This Heat trapped in a very small room together.
Fans of the band mostly focus on their three studio albums, which are all absolute works of art, but today I'll be focusing on something else - their seriously overlooked non-album singles and the way I've sequenced them into another album.
If we ignore the perversely '80s-pop-ish covers EP "Cavalcovers," the band has six non-album songs on streaming services, ranging from 2019 to 2021.
1. Talking Heads
Album sequencing is a bit of a lost art. Traditionally, most rock albums are locked into something like:
Short intro track (optional)
1 - Fast, exciting song, usually a single and/or the best on the album
2 - Slow ballad
3 - Midtempo banger
4 - Fast if 3 was slower, slow if 3 was faster
Everything after that - up to the artist, usually with the longest or most challenging song(s) at the start and end of the second half, so as to not scare off new listeners.
You can find this pattern everywhere, and I mean everywhere, from the 60s to the 90s, high art to low art, Bob Dylan to Car Seat Headrest. While Spotify-focused artists don't need to think about it much as they know their songs will mostly be heard alone in playlists and mixes, Black Midi, ever the traditionalists, religiously follow the paradigm on all three studio albums (if we consider the minute-long title track of Hellfire to be an intro and not its own song), so I tried to sequence these accordingly.
"Talking Heads" begins the list with a fun uptempo math-rock groove. "I call this poem Disappearing Tongue," frontman Geordie Greep sneers in his trademark nasally, unplaceably European accent, going on to deliver a meaningless nonsense (yet somehow completely captivating) chorus about "pulling out feathers" and some lines about PVC. At the time of recording in early 2019, all the band members were only nineteen, which makes the relative complexity of this track quite an accomplishment.
2. Despair
The B-side to the 2021 single release of the immense first track on Cavalcade, "John L," "Despair" serves the role of the slow ballad in this playlist. Unusually for the group, the lyrics are pretty understandable as a love song, with Greep addressing a "Valentine," saying that while he would wait an eternity for her to join him, he wants to do it before they grow old and lose their passion. This would fit right in on Cavalcade, the band's second album, which has a persistent lyrical focus on inevitable endings, old age, etc.; indeed, it was included as a bonus track along with "Cruising" on the Japanese CD release. It's quite subtle and has a soft, almost "MPB"-esque atmosphere.
3. Crow's Perch
Bringing back the groovy, noisy energy from "Talking Heads," "Crow's Perch" was one of the band's first releases, all the way back in spring 2019. In one interview, the group said it was based on the video game series The Witcher, which includes a location with the same name.
The lyrics are inscrutable yet violent ("face down! gone, gone!"), and the 5/4 beat is subtle yet inexplicably off-putting, keeping you off your guard the whole way through. While the band has used synth overdubs before, it's usually not a prominent part of the song like it is here, making it almost… danceable?
4. Cruising
Finally, we come to my favorite song on this pseudo-album, the darkly sublime "Cruising." After a faster track 3 comes a slow, murky track 4. Look at that cover art! Tempos crawl, drummer Morgan Simpson gets on the brushes, and Greep drops to a baritone murmur, with most of the song in an unsettlingly low dynamic range alien to anything else in the band's repertoire. One perfect guitar figure is repeated over and over, mutating into something entirely different as the intensity gradually builds to a beautiful finish.
"Cruising" takes certain inspirations from the traditional Latin American ballad "Amapola." Aside from the name Amapola being prominently featured in the lyrics, the melody seems to be a mutation or variation on the old tune. One could say it's like a sequel to the love song - if you read the lyric sheet (which you have to to understand the incomprehensible mutterings) Greep seems to play the role of an extremely old man missing his wife.
5. Sweater
The most challenging, perplexing song in Black Midi's whole repertoire goes solidly in the second half of the set. An 11-minute fever dream featuring several passages of creepy near-silence, "Sweater" is influenced by avant-garde classical music more than the band's rock predecessors. The riff, if you could call it that, is in an odd time signature and never seems to line up with when you think it will. The whole mess is worth it, however, as there's a dramatic payoff around the 7-minute mark and some really well-recorded ominous ambiance throughout the whole song. Notably, it was sampled by Phoenix, AZ hip-hop group Injury Reserve for their song “Knees.”
6. 7-Eleven
Though it might be a bit of an odd choice to end an album on, I justify this placement simply because it doesn't fit anywhere else. 7-Eleven is a spoken-word monologue by bassist and secondary songwriter Cameron Picton. His songs on the band's studio albums stun and defy expectations, as he bursts into punk screaming on "Near DT," reclaims slurs on "Eat Men Eat," and whispers creepily on "Slow," but here he's content to put on a bizarre pseudo-American country-singer accent and detail an unfortunate trip to his local 7-11. I won't spoil the ending, which must be heard to be believed, but I will say he perfectly pulls off what would certainly come off as a stupid or nonsensical moment in any other singer's hands.
Listen to it on Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/black-midi-leolbatrix/pl.u-r2yBBDPTParBDK8
JaffeeLabs housekeeping going forward
Ten issues, totaling twenty articles - wow!! When I started the idea of JaffeeLabs as an inside joke among a few friends in October 2023, I had no idea what was in store for it - I joked that some of my bizarre dining hall food combinations, like the PNA (peanut butter, nutella, and apricot jelly in three separate columns within a sandwich; when apricot jelly became unavailable, I made the spinoff "NP-incomplete") were "JaffeeLabs productions," but the idea of making it the title of a music blog (much less making a blog at all) was far off.
Over these ten issues, I've explored some of my favorite music and my most oddball ideas. In fact, I've made the real greatest achievement of my writing career: something I wrote put something else I wrote out of date.
Consider the second half of Issue 2, when I played some Six Degrees of Separation, using the obscure Alice Coltrane-Doja Cat connection to get to the pop star. I'm now only two degrees away thanks to Issue 9's interview with the legendary Gary Bartz, who had several recording sessions with Coltrane, describing her as a "sweetheart":
Bartz -> A. Coltrane -> Doja Cat
In honor of that, I'll go off on another tangent before we get to the real message of this half of the article. Let's try to connect to 20th-century avant-garde classical composer Béla Bartók, whose string quartets have been in heavy rotation for me over the past couple months.
Starting with the Gary Bartz connection, Bartz played with legendary bassist and composer Charles Mingus in a jazz workshop in the 1960s, as detailed in issue 9. Mingus included saxophonist Zoot Sims on the famously disastrous recording "Complete Town Hall Concert," which included material that would later become the 2-hour epic Epitaph. Sims played in the big-band orchestra of the prominent swing clarinetist Benny Goodman in a series of concerts in the '40s. Goodman, a bit randomly, commissioned and recorded this chamber piece with Bartók in 1940:
That's Bartz -> Mingus -> Sims -> Goodman -> Bartók in only five degrees. (I also have a connection to him via my sister's cello teacher, whose grandfather was in the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Serge Koussevitzky, an innovative conductor who personally commissioned Bartók's "Concerto for Orchestra." A friend also recently told me their previous music teacher had worked with avant-garde saxophonist Anthony Braxton, so I might be able to go down that route somehow.)
Wait, I forgot I was going to make an announcement - let’s get back to that.
I’m taking a lot of classes right now (18 credits!), so putting out two articles every two weeks has become an increasingly burdensome endeavor. Until the end of the school year (and possibly after that - we’ll see how it goes) I’m shifting away from the multi-part issue format and making each article standalone and a bit longer. I’ll return to multi-part issues if I don’t like the new format, but this is probably at least what you’ll be seeing until June. Posts will still be every other Friday. The first standalone article in this format comes out on 4/19.
I love you all madly!
-M.J.